Web Reputation and Phishing ProtectionSome companies use characteristics like where a site is hosted or how often it's been seen to develop a kind of "reputation" score. Avast!'s Web Reputation relies on the company's vast network of users for a literal reputation score. A toolbar button in your browser displays green, yellow, or red to show that the current site is safe, iffy, or dangerous. The icon's three bars let you know how many responses went into that rating. Simple!

Avast! also marks up search results in popular search engines, so you can steer clear of unsafe sites. You can dig in for additional detail, including whether the site has been flagged with any of five positive and five negative attributes. Want to join in? Click an overall rating, check off any attributes that seem appropriate, and click the Vote button.

In testing, though, I had a hard time finding any websites that weren't marked as safe, and I didn't find a single one that had any attribute flags. In addition, I'm not entirely sure the general public can be a reliable source of website safety information.

Avast!'s phishing protection is a separate, parallel service. If you're about to visit a fraudulent website, it displays a warning page instead. You can turn back (recommended), visit the site anyway, or report a false positive. Oddly, during testing, every site that avast! flagged as fraudulent got a clean bill of health from the Web Reputation system.

Last time I tested avast!, its antiphishing detection rate was among the lowest; this time around it's closer to the middle. Its detection rate lagged 55 percentage points behind antiphishing champ Norton, and 27 points behind the SmartScreen Filter component of Internet Explorer 8. On the plus side, avast! and Internet Explorer complement each other; a combination of the two would have scored just 20 percentage points behind Norton.

Bonus FeaturesHackers and malware writers frequently manage significant security breaches by taking advantage of vulnerabilities in the operating system, the browser, or some other significant software component. In many cases, just keeping everything up to date would have been enough to prevent the breach. New in this edition, avast!'s Software Updater checks for unpatched vulnerabilities.

You can run a full Software Updater scan any time you like. Even if you don't, avast! will run one in the background and pop up to warn you of any problems. In most cases, you can click a button to fix the problem. It's a nice feature.

Avast!'s commercial products include a sandbox feature that you can use at will to run possibly-dangerous programs without risking permanent damage to your system. There's no manual sandbox control in the free edition, but if it detects a suspicious program it will automatically sandbox it, for your protection. Just about all of my hand-written analysis tools got flagged as suspicious, which is actually not unreasonable.

Your typical Browser Cleaner wipes out browsing traces such as history entries and temporary files, so nobody else can snoop your browsing habits. Avast!'s Browser Cleaner, new in this edition, focuses instead on toolbars.

Many modern software installers include the option to install an unrelated toolbar, often with the boxes checked by default. You can wind up with so many toolbars that they impact the visible size of the websites you're visiting. It's not terribly difficult to disable or remove the ones you don't want, but Browser Cleaner automates the process for Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome.

Hey, It's Free!Millions of people all over the world rely on avast! Free Antivirus 8 for protection. That's great, because the large user-base helps avast! stay current with new malware. On the other hand, both in my own tests and in independent lab tests its ability to remove malware and block new infestations isn't up there with the best. You won't go wrong using it, and the new Software Updater may save your bacon. But while you're checking out free antivirus, you should also consider our Editors' Choice in that category, AVG Anti-Virus FREE 2013.

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Neil Rubenking served as vice president and president of the San Francisco PC User Group for three years when the IBM PC was brand new. He was present at the formation of the Association of Shareware Professionals, and served on its board of directors. In 1986, PC Magazine brought Neil on board to handle the torrent of Turbo Pascal tips submitted by readers. By 1990, he had become PC Magazine's technical editor, and a coast-to-coast telecommuter. His "User to User" column supplied readers with tips...
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